I am of two minds about this. I think that on the whole that Amazon would have been a net benefit… but I also know it would have been a disaster for those living in the neighborhood.
I have friends over there who own a brewery in that area… I am not sure of their opinion. Whether they thought it would a net positive or if they were worried that they would have to relocate when their commercial lease was up.
One of the guys that I know who has a distillery in Williamsburg I was hanging out with last night and he was against it… but he is a kind of a weird curmudgeon to begin with.
Amazon not moving into LIC isn’t changing a dam thing about the gentrification of the neighborhood. There are a multitude of apartments/condos that are being constructed as I type this! This is a lost of economic activities for all involved! Stupid AOC has no idea how tax incentives work! She things the City was giving Amazon 3b in cash, no fool, it’s a tax break for creating all the jobs! Blame Como for the bad message, he failed to articulate this to the citizens!
Yeah… that boom has happened in pretty much the past decade. When I worked on Gossip Girl circa 2010-2014?.. I was over there at Silvercup Studios all the time and they were just breaking ground on the highrises that are all around the Queensboro subway stop. It is almost unrecognizable from what it was five years ago.
As someone who lived in San Francisco between 2011 and 2014, I can conclusively say that gentrification can always get worse. I watched the already staggeringly high cost of living almost double in 3 years.
When I moved to SF, I paid $1450 a month for a 600-sq/ft 1-bedroom.
When i left that apartment and moved to Oakland, i ended up paying $2100 for a smaller apartment in Oakland - and my previous apartment went back on craigslist advertised at $2800.
I’m sure the population of Dallas being 1.3 million and the population of NYC being 8.6 million have nothing to do with the current trends shown on that map.
What NYC really needs is 25,000 new jobs to help get their population growing again. Waaaaay more than other areas of the country that are already overcrowded with high paying jobs.
A net benefit for the city… but I wouldn’t want it my backyard.
The rapid building of condos and rent blight is already a huge problem citywide… dropping something as huge as an Amazon HQ would pretty much destroy the fabric of any neighborhood. Especially a Neighborhood that has been on the upswing already.
As an example. The Barclay’s Center sits at the end of the my neighborhood. When they first proposed building it, they were going to drop an Arena and a bunch of highrise buildings right in the middle of a neighborhood that was revitalizing. They were trying to sell it as knocking down slums… but that wasn’t the case at all. The neighborhood fought back against that eminent domain and the project got scaled way back. Now the Arena is kind of a hub of economic activity in the area with the added benefit of keeping a lot of the “character” of the neighborhood.
For a while at least.
Since then, there has been a great displacement of some of the more traditional blue collar businesses in that area to make way for cheaply built condos and boutique businesses. Replacing middle class blue collar jobs with lower paid services for Upper Middle Class to Upper Class customers. Where there was once a light manufactury there is now a Trader Joe’s… things like that.
But that is kind of the natural churn of “progress” in my mind.
So LIC is already changing. Nothing is really going to stop it. With the Amazon HQ that would have happened at an even greater pace than it already is… and be subsidized by the taxpayer to boot.
The fact is that Amazon couldn’t get anything built without satisfying Gianaris because unlike AOC, he actually wields power to make a decision on this.
AOC has the ability to send out mean tweets… thats it.
Gianaris has something much more powerful… an actual vote.
I grew up in Park Slope, and getting involved in the anti-Barclay’s Center thing was my introduction to working in politics professionally.
I started working for a guy running for State Senate who strongly opposed the arena - because my favorite Bar was going to be demolished in its footprint.
Those kind of extremely tiny increases in the cost of living in California are not the problem. The real problem is all of the lazy homeless cluttering up the streets of those otherwise beautiful neighborhoods.
